Textile Recycling Excellence (T-REX), is a new EU-funded project consisting of 12 players from across the entire recycling value chain that aims to create a circular system for post-consumer textile and fashion waste.
The T-REX Project (Textile Recycling Excellence) is working with fashion manufacturing companies and brands, including sports brand adidas and innovation programme Fashion For Good, to create a harmonised EU blueprint for closed-loop sorting, and recycling of household textile and fashion waste.
The three-year project wants to transform end-of-use textiles, from waste, into the desired feedstock, and a commodity for new business models that can be adopted at scale given that the Fashion for Good and Circle Economy’s ‘Sorting for Circularity Europe’ October 2022 report suggests only 2% of post-consumer European textiles are currently being diverted to fibre-to-fibre recycling.
Over a three-year period, the T-REX Project will collect and sort household textile waste and demonstrate the full recycling process of polyester, polyamide 6, and cellulosic materials from textile waste into new garments. At the same time, the project will demonstrate sustainable and economically feasible business models for each actor along the value chain, conduct lifecycle analysis of the circular process, integrate digital tools that streamline the process of closed-loop textile recycling, and produce circular design guidelines.
The project hopes to provide an understanding and identify the infrastructure, technology and policy needed to encourage the growth of circular value chains in the textile and fashion industry. The partners will work towards developing a systematic approach to addressing the problem of textile waste, resource preservation and reduction of the environmental footprint of the fashion industry.
The T-REX Project explains that creating a circular system for post-consumer textile waste currently faces many challenges, including a lack of standards for collecting and sorting textile waste across countries, inaccurate composition claims, uneven quality of materials, and a lack of reliable data across value chain stakeholders.
It hopes to increase knowledge on the systemic change required to scale fibre-to-fibre recycling, adding to previous studies that include the Fashion for Good and
Circle Economy’s ‘Sorting for Circularity Europe’ Report, which showed 74% of low value, post-consumer textiles are readily available for fibre-to-fibre recycling in six European countries. The T-REX Project believes this finding offers an immense opportunity to accelerate textile recycling, but still requires an integrated approach to
deliver for scale.